• X (formerly Twitter) has announced that it will be cleaning up the platform and removing accounts that infringe its rules on manipulation and spam.
• In particular it wants to ensure the platform, “remains secure and free of bots.”
• It has also warned that users will see fluctuations in their follower counts as a result of this clean up.

X (formerly Twitter) has always had a bot problem. Something that current owner Elon Musk has long said is one of the biggest issues on the social media platform, while also using the situation to point to how much “organic traffic” has risen on X ever since he took over.

While the platform will always have to contend with bot accounts, it looks like more tangible steps are being taken to address this, as X’s Safety department have alerted users that it is kicking off a clean up project this week.

The project is specifically looking to boot accounts off the platform that infringe X’s policies around manipulation and spam, of which most bot accounts are guilty.

“Today, we’re kicking off a significant, proactive initiative to eliminate accounts that violate our Rules against platform manipulation and spam. While we aim for accuracy in the accounts we remove, we’re casting a wide net to ensure X remains secure and free of bots,” it shared in a post.

The project will also impact follower count, X has warned, and in all likelihood will result in many users seeing less followers on their accounts over the coming days.

“As a result, you may observe changes in follower counts,” X explained.

Along with warning about less followers, X is also directing users to this appeal page should their account be caught up in the clean up effort and be removed as a result.

As TechCrunch points out, it looks like X is taking manipulation on its platform a little more seriously than it has in the past. This latest clean up project follows the hiring of two new executives within the company’s Safety team – Kylie McRoberts as head of Safety, and Yale Cohen as head of Brand Safety and Advertiser Solutions.

Hopefully though the pair are not just “yes” people, as the hiring of Linda Yaccarino as CEO of X has turned out.

Either way, it will be interesting to see what the clean up yields as far as rooting out bots from the platform, how it will make the platform look more favourable to advertisers, as well as what less followers will mean for the increase in organic traffic that Musk is striving for.

[Image – Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash]